


the lawrencian diptych

by peonies



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Post-Series, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 14:13:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1944204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peonies/pseuds/peonies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end after the end, and two different beginnings. Someone is dead, and someone is in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. until this empty place is filled

He did not retire; every hunter knows there is no turn-off from the road. But afterwards, everything left him alone, which was what he’d been hoping and praying for all along, even if it was only in secret hopes and furtive prayers. Monsters gave up and ran off and a door swung shut behind them, closing with a weary thud. He knew it was different this time because before, in a month or two, he’d have found himself driving down a quiet country byway with no one but the trees and the plains and the sky to watch him stagger from motel to motel, sleeping with a gun under a pillow that smelled like cigarette smoke.

He was married, though. Had a kid. Beth had chosen a house for them tucked away in the mountains of West Virginia. The day he picked his daughter up from her first day of preschool was one of his proudest, and he carried her home from school, and she answered all of his questions with complete seriousness, and he was happy. It was just the beginning of autumn and the sun was still high when they got home. He opened the door and Beth came forward, scooped the little one up, kissed him on the cheek, and headed back inside. They had dinner. He watched the sun set with Beth from the window of their bedroom. And then when daylight began to brush at the curtains, he half-woke to the sound of fluttering wings and a hand on his shoulder.

“Sam,” came the gravelly voice, and he already knew.

 

The end of things came early on a September morning near Laredo, Missouri. It was cold and foggy and the sunlight came in pale and weak from the east.

His brother sat with his back against an old fencepost, arms crossed, one leg bent. There were three rents across the front of his jacket, and the black gloss of blood hid underneath. His eyes were half-lidded and Dean could have been drifting off to sleep after a watchful night, but he was in the middle of a field in Missouri, and he’d been hunting for a long time, and _Cas._

Dean turned his head to face him as he sat next to him.

“It’s that time of year again,” he drawled. “I guess this is the last train to the Mysterious Beyond.”

“Everyone knows you could take on a sharptooth,” Sam said, letting his head fall back against the decrepit wooden rail. “What was it?”

“Black dog. Appropriate, right? Portents of death, oooh, and crap. I saw it around town a few times while I was huntin’ it down.”

“Did you gank it?”

“Sure as shit,” he said, then coughed quietly. His face was pale and there were deep shadows under his eyes. He’d looked like this only once before, and it had taken a reaper to bring him back from the brink. Dark stubble brushed along his jaw and chin, a smear of ash on his white face. He turned to look at Cas. “And I don’t want you blaming yourself over this, all right? I didn’t call you ‘cause I knew...”

“I wasn’t busy,” Cas said, face full of quiet desperation. “I could have come.”

“Yeah. Well, I wasn’t... spectin’ to call.” He was starting to slur some of his words. _He’s cold,_ Sam thought, and wished he could have taken a pillow or something from the room.

 _“Dean,”_ he said.

“Look, it’s gettin’ kinda chilly, so I gotta say... no bring-backs ‘s time, Sammy. F’serious. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And wherever I go... upstairs... downstairs... you don’t follow too fast. Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Good,” he sighed, and coughed again, a thin, rasping noise. “Cas, the Impala’s parked in town... keys are in the front pocket.” He tapped his jacket with a finger. “If you crash her, Sam’ll beat the tar outta you.”

“I can teleport.”

“It’s for _after._ Now shut up and jus’ – c’mere, Sasquatch.”

He shifted over across the wet grass so that their arms were touching, and with some effort Dean maneuvered himself so that he was leaning against him. Sam laid an arm around Dean’s shoulders and rested his head against his.

“Would ya look at that,” his brother murmured. The sun was throwing out golden beams through the clouds, lighting up vast expanses of rolling farmland, gentle green pastures, woods that looked like seas of dark leaves. In the distance, the sound of a car making its way down a never-ending road.

And then the end – quiet, subdued, a heavy sadness that kept him sitting there long after Dean could feel his arm around his shoulders. He was so tired that he felt like he could sleep for decades.

 

When he finally brought himself to touch the lighter to the gasoline-soaked cloth, Cas was there, too, so silent that he could have been a mirage in the heat of the fire, every word that came to their mind in the tongues of angels and humans crumbling to dust in the flickering light. Sam watched, even though the smoke made his eyes sting and water, and he didn’t bother to wipe his face. When the flames had their fill and only burned in embers, Cas stood next to him.

“What did he mean by _after?”_ Sam asked.

“There are things that are beyond me now,” he said. “Resurrection of the dead being one of them. I can barely hear the others talking. Soon it’ll all be gone.”

“Your grace?”

A mirthless chuckle. “He kept saying it was because I spent too much time with him.”

It was cold, and a wind passed through, and Sam shivered.

 

Castiel took him home, then left, still with a face that looked lost at sea.

There was Beth’s key in the door, and then Beth, dark hair pulled back and discerning eyes wide with surprise, stood in the doorway. She stepped forward and hugged him, and he hugged her back, and they stood there for what seemed like hours before she pulled away, reaching out to touch his face. Her fingers came away wet. And Beth, to whom he’d told everything, who had come to know him very well, knew what was wrong before he said anything. She held him and they stood in the kitchen until it was time to pick Allison up from school.

“I wasn’t scared,” she whispered as they lay on their bed that night. “I knew you went with Castiel, so I told Allison you’d gone to see one of your old friends... she was worried.” There wasn’t any reproach in her voice, but her face was lit up by the moon and she looked infinitely sad. He put his hand on her waist, felt it rise and fall with each breath.

“I’m not going to leave,” he whispered back. “I promised you.”

She put her hand over his, stroked her thumb across his knuckles. “I might visit my grandparents soon.”

“When?”

“Whenever Allison gets off from school. Family trip. I want you to come.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

He watched her fall asleep, listened to her breathing and smoothed her hair from her face. That night, like so many other nights, he couldn’t sleep. He remembered long drives in the Impala. Stitches in his hand. An enormous moon shining down on a deserted road. A furtive Christmas in Illinois. Sunlight glinting off broken glass in the salvage yard and the smell of hot asphalt. Apple pie under plastic wrap at the convenience store. Arms that held him tight as he died.

 

The days passed dreamlike, overlaid with whispers of memories and phantom voices.

He waited for it, half-anticipated it, but it never came. This wasn’t like the other times, then. There was a wound, like a limb torn off all over, but now there was no feeling of drowning. There was pain, but when it lifted on occasion it left him feeling in colors, instead of in gray and deep, deep black, and after a while it was no longer a constant vise around his heart or the pressure of cinderblocks on his chest.

 _You’re going to be the first Winchester to grieve normally,_ he told himself as he listened to the coffee machine gurgle. He opened his eyes when he heard slow footsteps coming down the stairs – Beth, in her sweatpants and bathrobe, with mussed hair and bleary eyes.

“Oh. Coffee. Good,” she muttered, shuffling over to the refrigerator.

“Sleep well?”

“Mm. You look like shit. Did you sleep at all?” The left door opened with a swoosh of suction and she fumbled around for the creamer.

“More,” he admitted. “I got to bed around three.”

She flashed him a smile. Beautiful. “Better. I’m glad.”

He took the creamer and set it down on the counter. She kissed him and they watched black coffee drip down into the glass carafe for a while.

 

“First unheard message.”

_(Sigh.) Hey, Sam. It’s Kevin. I know we haven’t talked for a while, but I’m... still in the loop. Heard about Dean._

_I know you must be going through a lot of stuff right now, and the last thing you need is another, like, “oh dude I’m so sorry, I’m here for you, we all loved Dean,” and crap. Uh, I dunno if you remember, but my mom passed a while back. So I have an idea of what it feels like, you know? It sucks, and I miss her every day. Point is, you’ll be okay. Might take a while, might take years, but, uh... it stops feeling like you’re drowning._

_(Throat clearing.) Anyway. Just got finished with a rugaru in Colorado. Pretty freaky stuff, I didn’t know there were any still left west of Iowa. Surprise, I guess. Say hi to Beth and Allison for me. Take care of yourself._

“End of unheard message. To listen again, press _one_ on your screen. To hear more messages, press _two._ To delete this message, press _three...”_

 

Winter swept in that year with gusts of freezing wind, and during the early nights it heaped a crown of white on the autumn-balded forest and blanketed the city roofs, flooding the streets knee-high with a tide of snow and ice, and turning all the shadows blue.

Allison was ecstatic. She was three years old and still a little unsteady on her feet in the way small children are, and he had to put her on his shoulders, otherwise the snow came up to her neck. Beth wasn’t bothering with the outdoors at all that day and was still in bed. So he walked around the block, snow soaking through his shoes, jeans, and heavy socks. His breath puffed out in bursts of white smoke that hung in the air, and his daughter was pretending to be a dragon.

There was a snowball fight going on the length of the street between the Briggs’s house and Mr. Richards’s. Allison shrieked with laughter as he sprinted through the fifteen yards of chaos in question, dodging a few snowballs, and clamped her mittened hands on either side of his head. He laughed.

Some days things were so perfect that he suspected a djinn was sucking him dry in the Real World. House. Wife. Daughter. Job. Once upon a time he’d wanted this in the LA suburbs, with mile-high palm trees and distant blue mountains cloaked in smog, with Jessica Moore sitting next to him, their feet in the pool in their backyard. And things were so different now, and he’d grieved Jess by hunting and getting into fights with his brother. Winchesters didn’t grieve well – it was practically a family tradition – but –

He was... all right. Surprisingly. It was almost like learning to walk again after having his knees blown out. The foremost thoughts in his head became less _I miss you, I love you, my brother isn’t going to answer his cell if I call him_ and more _it’s cold out, forgot eggs at the grocery store, Beth wants to watch a movie tonight._

It didn’t feel quite right. He should have been a mess, he knew that much. _Dean_ was as much a part of his living as his dying; they were flesh and blood. It had always been Sam-and-Dean and no other constant.

 _Maybe once,_ a small part of him said, _but that’s not true anymore, is it._

He didn’t know. All he knew for certain was his daughter on his shoulders and snow in his shoes and sunlight so bright he had to close his eyes.

 

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Beth took Allison to Day Mass and he was alone in the house. Usually he went with them on Sundays, at first more out of obligation than anything else, but then because it gave him a chance to connect with his neighbors, if not the divine. Beth’s father was a priest in Arkansas and very familiar with hunters, and as a consequence she had grown up with very tangible reasons to pray, knowing that shadows could have teeth and claws. She knew how to stitch up a wound and tie a tourniquet and fire a rifle, and had an arsenal of prayers besides.

Late one night, as they were watching reruns of an old sitcom, she asked him if he believed in God. In heaven, or hell, or anything after. He told her he’d visited both places personally but she shook her head and asked him if he _believed_ in them and he didn’t have an answer. What the hell a hunter even puts faith _in,_ if anything, he didn’t know. Family, for a Winchester. He’d never seen God, just good people and monsters and sometimes a mix of both. Sometimes he wished for the amulet back, just to see, but Beth wore her rosary and scapular with such confidence and faith that hanging around her seemed like a better bet.

He figured, after September, that he had to _believe_ in heaven just a little bit, that although no one down here knew who got in or got left out for sure, there was at least some kind of invisible Oprah Winfrey Show In The Sky going on and Dean had been awarded a ticket to paradise by virtue of having martyred himself time after time for his shithead little brother.

Because it couldn’t go any other way. He refused to even consider the possibility.

 

“First unheard message.”

_Uh, hi, Sam. It’s Kevin. Sorry we haven’t actually talked since, like, your wedding. I’m guessing you got my voicemail, it’s been like three months or something, right? Hope you’re doing better. Anyway. Ganked a... I mean, it’s called a “c_ _ương thi” in Vietnamese but I guess you could call it a “life-sucking hopping zombie vampire” if you wanted to, because that’s what it is. Had to hack off a branch from some poor family’s peach tree and stake the stupid thing, which was hard, because A) hopping, B) life-sucking. And it’s moldy. Oregon is weird._

_But I wanted to ask you how you were doing, stuff. Also, I wanted to ask about Castiel. He’s been... I dunno, weird. Weirder than usual. Call me back if you know anything, tell me how the family is. Bye._

The snallygaster, or so the locals said, was half-lizard and half-bird, with a metal beak full of sharp teeth, and one horrible eye in the middle of its forehead. It had wings like an eagle’s and four taloned feet, yellow-and-black striped scales on its skin like armor, and a long whiplike tail. It drank human blood and ate chickens, but the bloodsucking part was the main concern.

Someone ganked it, much to the relief of moonshiners all over Maryland, by painting heptagrams on the walls, doors, and ceiling of an abandoned barn, then luring it inside with a couple of live hens and cutting its head off with a machete. There was nothing left but a charcoal smear on the floor by morning, and the chickens were returned unharmed to their coop.

Sheepsquatch, though. Sheepsquatch was exactly what it sounded like. A woolly, sheepy sasquatch. Good job, West Virginia. It had never actually hurt anyone, despite reports of torn-up vegetable patches and a minor assault on a car, but apparently it had started terrorizing hikers on the Appalachian Trail and tossing them off particularly steep paths and also biting them to death with its foot-and-a-half-long fangs. The headlines were predictably gleeful in their use of the word SHEEPSQUATCH.

Two anonymous hunters, one in business casual, managed to kill it, too.

There were rumors starting to spread about a man in a trenchcoat driving a black Chevy up and down the East Coast and hunting down every bump-in-the-night he could get his hands on with chilling methodicality. On occasion Sam would head out to Mount Nebo, Webster Springs, or Marlinton on a weekend to get a heads-up on local monster activity – he wasn’t hunting anymore, but he wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t going to be caught unawares – and sometimes he would catch a faint whisper of Castiel’s hunts.

It troubled him sometimes because he had no idea what it meant – if Cas had chosen to go down the Sam road, the Dean road, or the John road. Once or twice he prayed to him but he never came, and Sam suspected that he couldn’t hear him anymore. So all he had were the stories of half-drunk hunters and an emergency contact number.

 

They are in Nebraska, driving west on I-80, nothing in sight but flat plains of dry yellow grass and dark leafless trees that splinter out of the ground. It is winter, but the sky is summer-blue and cloudless. He watches the country speed past through half-opened eyes from under a fringe of dark hair – he woke up a good fifteen minutes ago but he hasn’t found the energy to actually sit up. His chin leans against his chest and his arms are folded, and Dean hasn’t stuck a spoon in his mouth or anything, so all in all it’s a very comfortable position.

The music has been turned down to an acceptable volume and Dean is actually humming louder than James Hetfield at the moment. It’s “Enter Sandman” from the snatches he picks up, and the thumping on the steering wheel matches the rhythm guitar beat for beat.

An hour seems to pass like this and he leans his head back against the headrest, listening to his brother cover the greatest hits of Metallica. Eventually the cassette runs out and they drive on in silence.

The sun is sinking almost imperceptibly in front of them, and Sam eventually sits up and clears his throat, shaking the sleep from his face.

“Mornin’, sunshine,” Dean says. “Did you dream up Texas Chainsaw Massacre IV?”

“Shut up,” he says, and it is literally the equivalent of sticking his tongue out. Dean snorts.

“I’ll take that as a no. Thank God. Number three was a disaster. Never watchin’ that again.”

Sam ejects the cassette and rummages through the cardboard box between his feet, picking up the empty case and popping it open with his thumbnail, then sliding the cassette back into its resting place.

“You wanna put anything on?”

Dean considers this. “Nah. You pick something.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Driver picks the music?”

“Shotgun shuts his cakehole and puts on some hits.”

“Okay, okay. Uhh, Guns N’ Roses?”

“Sure, whatever.”

Sam shrugs and checks to see if the _Appetite for Destruction_ cassette has been rewound, then pushes it into the deck. The opening riff snarls through the speakers and he sits back, stretching. Dean hums along again and bobs his head, then flashes a grin at him.

He doesn’t know why but his chest clenches up and there’s a deep ache settling in his lungs. All of a sudden he feels like crying.

“You okay, Sammy?”

“I’m fine,” he says, but it still feels like there’s a fist clenching around his heart and he doesn’t have the slightest idea why.

 

He didn’t actually see Cas again until March came to put pale green buds on the trees. His heart jumped when he saw the Impala parked in his driveway and a man leaning against it, hands in his coat pockets, not quite looking at anything. When Sam called his name he turned around and waved in greeting. Same blue eyes, same dark hair, same shirt and tie.

“Hey,” he said, smiling, walking a little faster.

“You seem well,” Cas called. “I thought you wouldn’t be back for a few hours.”

“I work from home. How long’ve you been standing here?”

“Half an hour, I think.”

They walked up the stairs to the front deck and Cas held the grocery bag while Sam fumbled for his keys, unlocking the door and taking the groceries back.

Being around Castiel, he found, was like being shaken awake. And as a consequence he found he’d been dreaming. He’d missed – this. Whatever this was. The whole body of their history laid out behind them, the wars and silences. The blind trust.

 _What you really miss,_ the small part of him said, _is when you would die for them and when they would die for you._

 _Well,_ _that’s really fucked up,_ he snapped,and started putting the groceries away. Bag of onions, carton of milk. One bunch tomatoes. Two cartons of eggs.

But it was, in a strange way, simpler back then. I got your back, you got mine.

He offered Cas a beer and, to his surprise, he took it, palming the cap off as Sam sat across from him at the dinner table.

“How’re you doing?” he asked in earnest. Cas squinted at the label for a moment, then looked up.

“He told me to say hello,” he said abruptly. “And to not do anything stupid. He misses you. And he also called you a bitch.”

Sam stared at him for a good minute. There was a little smile playing on Cas’s lips as he sipped from the bottle and he wasn’t sure –

“How’d you...”

“It took the last of my strength, and help from one of my sisters, but I considered it a sort of last trip home.” He drank. Sam decided not to question it any further, but he didn’t know where to start, otherwise.

“So is he... okay?”

“He is happy.” And Cas really did smile then. “He shares a heaven with the Harvelles.”

He didn’t know how to respond except laughter because Dean _would._

And for some reason it was a weight off of his shoulders, because _ignoring_ took energy but _knowing_ didn’t. _Knowing_ that Dean had finally gotten what he deserved and no more of this life-on-earth bullshit, no more eternal weight of the world. He couldn’t imagine it, though, and wanted to ask Cas every single question he could think of – what was he doing, what was it like, who did they see, everything _._ And Cas told him everything he could, and couldn’t quite keep from being _joyful._

“I left Jimmy Novak,” he said later. “He’s sitting in a movie theater with Amelia. _GoldenEye,_ I think.”

“Good,” Sam replied. For the first time in a while he felt light, and he’d been fighting gravity for so long that he had forgotten what it felt like to be sure of himself. “You never said – how are you?”

Cas took a while longer to answer that, and he drank first.

“Chances are that I will live much longer than the average human being,” he said slowly. “And I am stronger. But everything else has gone. I can’t heal wounds, I can’t travel like I used to. And I can’t hear their voices anymore, no matter how hard I try. I’m not human, but I am... no longer an angel, either.” He looked pensive. “I had wings, you know. I was cosmic fire and a hundred thousand eyes. No human mathematics could describe me or the way I moved. But things are simpler now. I am Castiel in a dead man’s body and I am biding my time until I die, in a century or two centuries. And to you that might seem like forever, but I saw the birth of the sun...”

“Cas,” he said, because his friend’s eyes weren’t quite tracking anymore. Castiel looked back at him, and for a moment he could see how ancient he was. Billions of years as a warrior with divine purpose and he’d fallen for Dean Winchester, given up pieces of himself until this was all that was left.

“I don’t know where I’ll go when I die,” he said abruptly, breaking eye contact. “I don’t have a soul, Sam, and I lost the privileges that I was blessed with when I chose to stay here. So neither heaven nor hell. Purgatory, maybe, or not even that. So we’ll have to wait and see.”

He still had the bearing of an angel, Sam noticed with some sadness. He wore Jimmy Novak’s body like a mask and a cloak. The preternatural poise and stillness of his body were the clear imprints of an angel’s presence, but if what he had been saying was true, then he could almost see the dead weight of two folded wings hanging from his back, and hear the clatter of brittle bones, and the rustle of papery, glossless feathers.

Castiel left shortly before Beth got back from work, and Sam walked him outside, laid a fond hand on the Impala’s lean black sides. She was keeping up pretty well.

“Don’t forget to change your oil sometime soon,” he called as Cas pulled out of the driveway.

 

Beth had been possessed by a demon once, almost fifteen years ago. It had taken her body for a spin around the neighborhood and killed three people (Rachel, high school teacher, mother; Sierra, sheriff, parishioner; Brendan, frog enthusiast, twelve) before a local hunter had recognized Father Correias’s daughter beneath the blood smeared on her face and the vulgar taunts spewing from her mouth. Daniel brought her father to the place where he had tricked her into a devil’s trap. The exorcism was fast and brutal and left her unconscious for two days. Father Correias explained it as a sudden flu bug. No one ever found out.

“It fucking sucked,” she said. “I don’t remember a thing, thank God. You always think your mind is your mind and nothing can get inside –your thoughts and emotions are just chemical reactions, purely physical processes, where does a demon even _go_ in all of that,and then shit like this happens and you wake up like you blacked out after a night on the town, except something was inside you and you didn’t even know it. You can’t trust your own body, your own brain, because you can’t fight something you don’t know is coming, and people could die.”

Sam remembered Meg and Lucifer – or, he didn’t remember Meg, and remembers Lucifer even though he tries not to – and agrees.

For a while ther was nothing but the wet smack of raindrops against the windows and hollow drumming on the roof.

“And that’s the story of how I learned the Saint Michael prayer,” she noted wryly. “I know you trapped the guy down below, so I guess I’ll have to find another one.”

 

In May, Dean was in heaven and Sam was walking barefoot in the shallows of the Cherry River, listening to the frogs and birds and slapping away mosquitoes, the laces of his shoes tied to his belt.

Almost ten months.

The water here tumbled over smooth stones, glittering in the sunlight, no more than knee-deep at the middle, with tall green trees leaning over the banks, leaving a wide swath of blue sky for clouds like tufts of cotton to travel across.

Almost ten months too long.

It didn’t feel like a dream anymore. He’d braced himself for a wave of grief like a tidal wave, but instead it came in like tides, higher and higher, and then, incredibly, lower and lower.

He waded deeper, feeling the grit on the soles of his feet as the water numbed his calves. He’d rolled his jeans up to the knees but they were getting wet anyway.

And then there was Castiel, who lunged at every moving shadow until he’d practically fumigated the East Coast from Providence to Atlanta, and was slowly working his way westward through Appalachia. The whispers were more fantastic now. Things that they’d never had names for were gone. _Every monster that acts on its nature,_ he’d said. _Free will._

 _Shhh,_ said the Cherry River. He stood still.

Beth, observant Beth: _You know, you’re doing really well, Sam. You’re... smiling a lot more. And you’re always around for Allison when she needs you._

There was the flap of wings and he looked up, shading his eyes against the sun. A flash of gray, a kingfisher.

Last time, he’d hopped in the Impala and driven almost across the country. Dingy motels. Shady bars. Pine trees. Staticky news channels where anchors discussed the fall of SucroCorp. Ran over a dog, then moved to Texas. And the time before that, he’d buried his brother in Pontiac, Illinois, then drank blood like whiskey. And the time before that, he buried him in Dunnellon, Florida, then hunted for six months until he slammed a stake through Bobby’s back. And the hundred times before that he’d woken up, and woken up, and woken up. The two times he’d stopped it, he’d killed someone.

So what the fuck was he doing now. Silence. Just the river and the buzz of a gnat. _Shhhh._ He imagined that the sound of Castiel’s dessicated wings would be like the rustle of shredded paper and the wind shaking the branches of leafless trees.

Something itched under his skin and he didn’t know what. A memory. Dean sitting down on the opposite motel bed with Cas by his side and saying _Dude, if you don’t stop making sad goo-goo eyes at this Bethania chick I’m going to strap you to the roof of the Impala and drive to her house blasting fuckin’ Peter Gabriel from the stereo until you Lifetime your way into a white picket fence and two-point-five kids, I swear._

A memory. _Hey, Sammy. How ya doin’. Me and Cas found a nest of vamps over in Oklahoma. Thought I’d check up on you before we headed off._

A memory. Dean holding Allison for the first time. _Look, she’s bitchfacing at me. Awww. You really are Daddy’s little girl, aren’t you, kiddo._

Three years where everything was right, and the world didn’t need saving, and that had been enough to – to what. He didn’t hear anything from Dean for weeks at a time except for voicemails, didn’t see him except once every few months. Held him when he died, after he died, took three days for him to get up the courage to give him a hunter’s send-off. Unlike last time (and before that and before that and before that). And he didn’t – want him back this time.

 _The itch is,_ said the small part of his head, _you oughtta be killing yourself over this, Sammy. What’s wrong?_

Because if Dean was a part of his living and his dying, if he was flesh and blood and constance, if he was his _brother,_ then what part of this was grieving? It had washed over him and he had kept being a father and a husband and a friend. They’d agreed, no chasing each other through hell again, no sacrifices, no deals.

It was a hot day and the Monongahela was great and green around him and the water was cool now against his legs. He walked through the river, leaving dark wet footprints on dry rock, disturbing the water with clouds of dark silt. He closed his eyes and the sun lit up the insides of his eyelids to a searing red-orange.

 _You loved him._ _Is it not as much now? Doesn’t feel as bad? What’s different? You have Beth, you have Allison, you have the Holy Family Catholic Church._

Because once he stopped the end of the world for his brother, but the world is different now, and they weren’t the same people as they were back then. Change meant, at least in this case, _not throwing yourself away over and over again because Dean deserves more than this._

 _Shhhhh,_ said the Cherry River. The water ran past his ankles. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.

He felt strange. Everything had become quiet and he couldn’t pin down when it had started to be that way. Something was wrong, or nothing was wrong. There was no way of knowing. 

When he came to the next set of falls the sun was directly overhead and he turned around to walk upstream, back to the car. He drove home in silence, chasing the road through the mountains, back to the place where love waited.


	2. the grass don't even grow

When it comes down to it, he doesn’t know who’s who – they used to call Dean the Righteous Man, who was Abel, but he’s always felt more like Cain, with a coldness in him, dark as Guinness. He feels like he’s struck his brother down, anyway, and isn’t that all anyone remembers the older brother for? Didn’t Cain wander like this, too, until he faded into obscurity?

 

He’d been born in Lawrence, but his home had always been the open road; now he drifts aimlessly through the country, thinking of nothing in particular. The world outside the Impala melts into a long stream of general stores and water towers and empty plains and forests, shimmering like mirages in the July heat. He drives until the names of states mean nothing, until the asphalt seems to carry him wherever it wants, and hundreds of dingy, airless motel rooms become one place that always seems to smell like cigarettes and mildew. The gun under his pillow is still in his hand when he dreams in the muted colors of Purgatory. Days wash blearily into nights, and weeks and months pass in silence.

When he looks at his hands, they’re not his hands, even though he can see the chipped edge of his left thumbnail and feel the jagged edge when he rubs it with his finger. When he walks, it’s not his legs moving, and eating becomes a mechanical chore. The world is reduced to the worn leather on the steering wheel, the rumble of the engine, coffee like tar, and gas station burritos that have an ashy, funereal taste. Because, if he’s honest with himself, that’s all this has ever been if you just subtracted one Sam. Arrive, hunt, kill, dispose, drink, move on. Rinse and repeat.

Hunters are only a society in the barest of terms. It’s a scattering of blue-collar shadows bent on vengeance or nothing at all. Most of them are old, but some of them are young, with fresh wounds. He sees Sam’s face in every hunter under thirty because they share his little brother’s burning desire to help people and to get revenge, but inevitably they show old and bitter edges, and that’s how he reminds himself that they aren’t Sam and never will be.

Sometimes he dreams about standing over Sam’s funeral pyre. He wonders what coping technique Bobby would have recommended. The ghost is gone but his memory of Bobby, the part that’s supposed to stay here, hovers in half-silhouette at the edge of his recollection, a beard and a threadbare trucker hat and a gruff voice, the rumble of a can opener on a tin of beans, the smell of motor oil and Old Spice and whiskey. A hundred moments floating like dust in his memory but no body for them to live in. He remembers through a sea of fog.

 

Dean has never been good at keeping contact with people, but it’s only now that he feels truly anonymous. He hasn’t seen a familiar face in six months, and unless he’s slipped up in an unexpected way, no familiar face has seen his. The Impala is silent; she doesn’t talk to him anymore, not to tell him to take a look at her brake lines or to scold him with rattling noises about his reckless driving. He thinks maybe the life has gone out of the whole world, or at least Sam’s life, since even the sunlight seems cold and the grass blowing at the side of the road bends without complaint under the wind. Intellectually he knows everything looks the same, but it’s easier to believe that Sam’s changed something – he saved the whole God-forsaken planet and nobody cares, nobody cares about his dead little brother who was better than any of them.

Night in late September finds him near Mason City, Iowa, sitting on the roof othe Impala with a handle of bourbon, looking over the expanse of silk-tasselled ears of corn covered up in dark leaves, the faint metal spines of center-pivot irrigators arching across the field in the distance. They look like the silver backbones of ancient monsters. He sits there and thinks about nothing, lies back and stares at the glimmering stars and thinks about nothing. Someone has put stacks of bricks on his shoulders and he can’t get up anymore. Even if they weren’t there he doesn’t think he would want to, anyway.

The flutter of wings catches him off-guard. He turns his head to see Cas sitting next to him, trenchcoat and all, unruffled, like there isn’t a war going on right now.

“It took me a long time to find you, Dean,” he says.

Dean snorts into his pull of bourbon.

“I’m... sorry,” Castiel ventures after a while. “About Sam. If I’d known –”

Dean cuts him off, saying, “God damn, _shut up.”_

Cas doesn’t leave and Dean doesn’t say anything else. It feels like hours pass in silence and he can almost pretend nothing has happened between them. The sky, away from city lights, is dark and dusted with silver stars. Some of the bigger ones glimmer red and blue, like the lights on police car sirens. He can see Orion, the Big Dipper – if he looks harder, Leo and Pisces. The dusty belt of the Milky Way divides the sky in half and the moon is large and bright, the gray imprints of craters sharp on its face. It reminds him of the moon over the road in Heaven, in their Heaven, where Sam is now. He wonders if they’re watching the same night pass over their heads. He wonders if stargazing with Dad is one of Sam’s good memories.

They spent a couple of months in Iowa when Dad was on a hunt, when they were young. He’s come to realize that it’s the same wherever there’s corn – when you drive to school or work in the morning in June it’s barely out of the ground, calf-high, and with each passing morning you look out the window and see the fields covered in early mist, growing higher and higher, knee-high, waist-high. Then one day, down in the guts of August, it reaches over your head, dark green stalks and long, broad leaves in a forest rising up on the side of the road. Then someday in October, when fog pools between the hills, it’s gone, and the fields lie brown and bare for winter. That’s how he feels: past the prime of summer, stalled on the side of a country road as leaves fall silently from tree branches tangled with power lines. He used to kiss girls on nights like these, against the hood of his car. He wonders how many of them made it out of their hometowns.

Eventually Castiel breaks the drowsy silence.

“Have you spoken to Kevin?”

“The hell would I talk to him about?”

“He’s the prophet. He prophesies. It’s an important job.”

“Does it look like I care?” Dean gestures to the cornfield, the road, the sky. “Because I don’t. I don’t care about your war, I don’t care about angels or demons or monsters anymore. You can all go fuck yourselves.”

Cas is silent, but he can tell that he’s angry. He’s been in Jimmy Novak’s body for so long that he’s become fluent in human expressions and can’t turn it off – the clenched jaw and the slightly narrowed eyes. If this was just any guy in a bar, he’d be trying to disarm him with some buddy-buddy talk before socking him in the jaw, but it’s Cas and he’s drunk and he doesn’t _care._

“The Behemoth has sealed off the earth from Heaven, Dean. Everyone who has died in the last month is trapped in the Veil. You know what happens to ghosts who stay here too long.” Jimmy Novak’s eyes are a piercing blue anyway but Castiel’s presence makes them strange, clearer and more conscious than human eyes should be. Dean sees accusation written all over his vessel’s face. “You haven’t drunk yourself so far into stupidity that you can’t see what this means, have you? Just because Sam is safe—”

A spark of anger flares in his chest. “What do you want me to say? That you’re right? That the world’s going to end? Sure. Do you know whose fault this is? Not ours. Yours, God’s, the angels’. You let your family hate each other and you screwed humanity because of, what, sibling rivalry? _Sam_ had to save your ass. You know how much that cost him? Cost us? I’m done paying for other peoples’ mistakes, Cas. So yeah, I’m going to sit here and drink myself stupid. I think I damn well earned it.”

Castiel narrows Jimmy’s eyes and tilts his head, as if he’s not quite sure of what he just heard.

“Sometimes I forget that you’re still so young, even though you’re capable of so much. Sam wasn’t the first one to save the world. Sam’s not going to be the last.”

He scoffs. “So you’re gonna rope some other kid into putting himself in the line of fire?”

“No. This is _your_ job, Dean – saving the world. _Saving people._ It’ll be someone else’s job when you die. You can bear the mark, you can hold the blade, and you can kill the Behemoth. You will, or you won’t. You can save or condemn. You have more power than any power or principality in this world. Are you still going to run?”

“I’m Cain’s legacy,” he says, laughing. “This was your plan. What did you expect?”

 

He is not visited by angels for a full year, during which the edges of the world start to crumble. Tornado Alley is patrolled by weather anomalies and fault lines quiver all over the States. Mountains shed rocks in landslides and tides come in higher and rougher. The Behemoth is pulling at the fabric of reality from the abyss beneath Purgatory. Dean drinks and gets tired, gets used to the absence of Sam like the absence of a limb – slowly, through false starts and sleepless nights, with his teeth gritted. The sun and moon wheel over his head faster and faster, accelerating him through the seasons as he drives and remembers everything. Plastic wrap on apple pies from the gas station, cider from roadside markets, gunpowder burns on Sam’s hand like freckles, a handful of silver bullets glinting in the evening sun. They come to him in dreams and on the road, in the bar, at the rest stop. At the lip of a bottle and beneath the treads of a tire. It’s heaven on earth and sometimes he thinks he’ll never die but continue through eternity watching scenes from his life replay on the backs of his eyelids as he lies sleeplessly in dingy motel rooms.

The only thing he kills that year is a black dog in Laredo, Missouri. He doesn’t feel anything when the bullet rips through its heart and it collapses to the ground. It should feel good. There is the shadow of anger at his back but it’s all echoes from a time when things like this were important. Now he can’t imagine why they would be.

In September, Castiel sits down across from him in a burger joint in Arkansas. There’s no animosity between them and he’s surprised by this until he realizes that they are each just as tired as the other; they sit there, wordless, for a time. There’s a spot of blood on the lapel of his trench coat, no bigger than a thumbprint. Dean hasn’t had his ear to the ground in a while but he knows the powers of Heaven have been clashing. The odd corpse turning up here and there in the news with smoking craters for eyes hasn’t escaped even his notice. That tiny red dot is more confirmation than a hundred headlines that the war isn’t going so well these days.

“You got somethin’ to say?” It comes out more gruffly than he expected.

Castiel looks uncomfortable in Jimmy’s skin. “I wanted to – apologize,” he says haltingly. “The last time we spoke... I made some demands of you that were – perhaps too much.”

“Yeah. And? Still want me to stab that fucker in the face?”

“I...”

Dean stares down at the half-finished burger in his hands, thinking he won’t answer this time, but he’s never had time to install a filter, so why start holding back now?

“Look. So long as you keep coming to me with this _agenda,_ we got nothin’ to say to each other. That clear?”

“Dean.” He leans forward, prepared to defend his – whatever he’s going to say.

“No. This time, and every time from now on, just _no,_ Cas. Okay?”

“You haven’t even let me speak.”

They’re keeping their voices down, but an employee walks over to them and stands next to the table, her arms crossed.

“There a problem here?”

“No, ma’am,” Dean says, putting on a disarming smile and kicking Cas under the table. Cas doesn’t react to the kick except to shoot him a glare and turn to her as well.

“No, there is no problem.”

She eyes them skeptically but nods and walks away. Dean gestures toward the door and dumps his tray on the way out, not checking to see if Cas is following. The strangely small-town bustle of Little Rock greets them with sunshine and blue skies, but he’s not interested, and pulls the angel by the arm into the shade of the Burger King, cornering him next to the dumpster.

“Okay, talk,” he says.

Cas stares at him. He doesn’t seem confused. It’s one of those stares that says _hmmm,_ with a bunch of dots at the end. So Dean stands there, hands in the pockets of his jeans, staring right back at him.

“Let’s go somewhere else to speak.”

Dean blinks. “Where?”

Cas places a hand on his shoulder and the world is reshuffled like a deck of cards. The alleyway disappears, and in its place is a field of low bushes turning red from the advance of autumn. Evergreens stand on the edge of the field, rising, it seems, from a lake of smokeless fire into a perfect blue sky. In the distance rises a craggy gray mountain with a round dome, caped in shining white snow. He can see the blue cracks and gorges running down its face. He’s seen this before, on the fronts of postcards in Washington, standing by racks of stationery by the cash registers of tiny grocery stores while John paid for odds and ends by peeling twenties from the wad of bills in his pocket. Mount Rainier, not faded yellow this time, and more immense than he remembers from the postcards. _Wish you were here._ They are standing on an immense boulder that rises from the ground, half-buried in earth.

Castiel has this thing where he just lets his arms hang by his sides. Sure, he uses them to emote, but not very well, and not very often. It draws attention to him, not that he notices. Most people fidget or fold their arms or put a hand on their hip, but not the angels. Their arms are basically deactivated when they’re not being used. With the tone he takes, Castiel should be gesturing at him, but he doesn’t.

“I do not, strictly speaking, _need_ your help,” he says thinly.

Dean can feel his eyebrows skyrocket off of his face. He spreads his arms. “Then why the hell have you been bothering me about it?”

Castiel continues as if Dean hadn’t interrupted. “However, I would _like_ your help. I’ve been asking for it because you are good at what you do, and someone I consider – a friend.”

“So you brought me in for a preview.” He turns his collar up against the breeze and shades his eyes to squint against the sun. He doesn’t really know why Cas is still talking, because nothing is going to change his mind.

“It’s your choice.”

“Oh, so it’s a joke. Funny.”

“Two weeks,” Cas says. “And then you’ll be here, or you won’t. Your choice. I’ll do it if you don’t. Think of this as a... courtesy call.”

“Am I going to see you again?”

Cas shrugs. “I am not certain.”

“Fuck you, Cas.”

Mount Rainier vanishes and he's alone in the parking lot, staring angrily at the trunk of his car.

 

“You think Dad’s gonna be there when we get to the hotel?”

He glanced over at his brother and sighed. “Get your feet off the dashboard, and I don’t know.”

“I don’t think he is. Probably out drinking with one of his hunter friends or something.”

“Shut up, Sam.” The kid was in one of his moods again. It was probably puberty, seeing as he’d shot up two inches in the past few months and was encroaching on Dean Height territory. He didn’t fit into his clothes quite right anymore, and he wasn’t gaining weight proportionally, so when he folded himself into the passenger seat, he looked like a broomstick strapped down by a seat belt.

“You shut up.”

“No, you shut up.” He reached one hand over to swat his brother’s head without taking his eyes off of the road. Sam retaliated by fucking biting his finger. Dean yanked it back with a yelp. “I’m driving, asshole!”

Sam folded his hands over his face so that the heels of his hands met over his mouth, and made an incredible farting noise.

“Oh, real mature, Sam. What are you going to do next, sing an annoying song? Ask me if we’re there yet?”

“Well, are we?”

“No, so shut up and take a nap or something, you grumpy baby.”

Sam made a noise that sounded like what he just said, but annoying and stupid.

“Really, Sam?”

Sam rolled down the passenger window and stuck his head out of the car, effectively muting the radio. Dean groaned and rolled his eyes but he didn’t do anything. At least they were driving through a field and not a forest so he wouldn’t get his head knocked off by a stray branch. There was nothing he could say that would pry Sam out of his shell at the moment, so he’d just have to wait until he got bored in about twenty minutes. He reached over to his right and nudged the volume control with his finger so he could hear the opening riff to “Paradise City” over the wind.

True to experience, the little twerp got bored of getting smacked in the face with bugs every five seconds and slumped back into his seat, rolling the window up. His hair looked like a sad little haystack on top of his head. He folded his arms over his chest and stared adamantly out the window.

“You know,” he said after letting Sam stew for a couple of minutes, “someday you’re gonna miss this.”

Sam gave him an incredulous look. “What? Driving around in the backwoods with my weirdo family?”

“Yeah.”

“As if.”

He reached over to pat Sam’s haystack head, laughing over his little brother’s indignant yelling. He was happy. God only knew why, but he was, light as a feather and swift as the wind. Sam told him he was an asshole, but Sam was just a kid, and they had miles to go before Richwood, and the same number of years ahead of them.

 

He spends a week drinking in scummy, smoky, poorly-lit dive bars where the whiskey is watered down and every bartender is an ex-Marine. He doesn’t talk to anyone except to hustle some locals at pool for a couple bucks, which is converted almost immediately into alcohol. It’s easy to let the drinks burn down his throat and smoke up his brain. He doesn’t think, just drives from place to place on the long, straight roads of the midwest and ends the day at the bottom of a bottle. He avoids the headlines, doesn’t allow his mind to linger on the issue of Cas – until he gets thrown out of a bar in Colorado for picking a fight.

Dean lies on his back in a motel bedroom with loud orange wallpaper from eighties that night with his boots still on, watching the blades of the ceiling fan go around and around. He doesn’t remember the last time he shaved or showered, and when he raises his hands to his face he can see dirt under his fingernails. One crystal-clear thought pierces through the fog in his head: _You’re throwing it away, you son of a bitch. He’s waiting._

He’s been running for a year. Weightless, and free, but only in the way a feather is weightless, only in the way that a message in a bottle is free. Aimless, for the first time in his life, letting the armory in the trunk rust, collecting bottles in the shotgun-side footwell. He’s gotten used to Sam being dead, but he hasn’t dealt with it, only thinks about it when he’s too far gone to remember. He wonders if this is what Sam felt when he’d been blasted into Purgatory. He’d driven, too, long and blank across the silent highways, following his highbeams through the night. This, Dean realizes, is the moment Sam hits the dog with his car: he wakes up, starts fixing things, and falls in love.

He showers, shaves, changes into his last set of clean clothes, and leaves the motel.

 

Dean arrives in Ashford, Washington, with three days to spare. He resurrects an old habit and checks out the local newspapers over coffee in a diner, rubbing shoulders with hikers and campers from out of state. Just as he’s expected, strange things have been happening in these parts – freak thunderstorms pouring down from a blue sky, flashing lightning and rainbows; strange seismic tremors; windows shattering spontaneously in empty rooms; flowers growing and blooming out of season; strange lights in the night sky; visions of dead family members. All in the past two weeks. There must be a shitload of angels in the area.

Castiel doesn’t contact him. Dean is sure that he knows he’s there, though, and he tries to go about his business as usual to show that he’s not worried. Except he is worried. And he thinks about praying, but what is he going to do? He can’t fight, won’t fight anymore. Lisa made him feel this, years ago, like he couldn’t pick up a gun again, but not in this way, not because the fight had gone out of him. He’s an old dog, now, no good for hunting anymore, who would rather lie by the fireside and sleep. Three days pass in a haze of cold air, smoke from the fireplace, and black coffee.

On the day Castiel goes down to fight the Behemoth, there is a strange silence in the air. Even his footsteps sound muffled when he walks to the Impala in the early morning. He eats breakfast as the sun peeks over the surrounding forest, then takes a bottle of water back to the car. There is a single ring of cloud in the sky, perfectly circular, hovering in the distance. He turns it into his guiding star, and soon he crosses into Mount Rainier National Park through a tunnel of dark green pines. He pulls the car over in one of the parking lots and takes a map from the information kiosk, trying to figure out which valley is under the smoke ring. Eventually he picks out a trail that runs around several of the most likely areas and starts walking.

It’s eerie how silent everything is. There’s not even the sound of running water. He passes through pines and low-lying fields with one eye on the mountain, wracking his brain for the memory of how it looked two weeks ago. A field with red foliage, surrounded with green pines... that could be any field. He wanders out into a few to look up and see whether the ring is above it, but it never is. At noon he sits down on a boulder on the trail and takes the map out of his pocket. The ring is barely visible above the peaks of the pines, and the mountain is at his back.

The ground trembles beneath his feet. It’s faint, but he feels it, and it sets his heart jackhammering. He shoves the map into his back pocket and looks up at the edge of the ring, and makes a beeline for the ring just like he should have done in the first place.

It takes three hours. He has to make a detour around a lake and figure out a couple of tricky scrambles, but it’s nothing he hasn’t been trained to handle, and he doesn’t care about making it back to the parking lot. What’s in front of him is more important than near everything he’s put behind him.

The field is empty and quiet but the earth shivers every so often and sets the leaves rustling. He stands at the edge of the clearing, chest heaving, breath leaving his lungs in puffs of mist. It’s around two in the afternoon by the sun. He shades his eyes, trying to find the stone they stood on. He locates it at the other end of the clearing and heads for it. The tremors get stronger and stronger as he crosses the center of the field, and he stumbles a few times. When he looks up at the ring of clouds he sees a star shining bright in the blue sky. He doesn’t know why, but it fills him with a sense of foreboding. When he climbs up on the rock, the earth shakes once, so violently that he lies flat on his stomach to avoid falling off. It happens two more times and then there’s nothing for the longest time. The sun begins to fall. He shivers. Wonders how Cas is doing, or if he’s dead already and he’s going to wait out here until the world ends.

_He’s not dead,_ he tells himself. _If he was dead, I would know._

The sunset colors the sky gold and blue and purple, sets the clouds aflame, throws silver dust into the oncoming night. The last beams light up the field when the ring dissipates outward with a dull boom, like a gunshot in the distance, and the daytime star grows brighter and brighter until it sends a pillar of light lancing down to the earth. Dean shields his eyes and hangs on to the boulder for dear life as it sends a shockwave through the clearing on impact. It doesn’t help. He’s rattled around and then flung from the top like a die in a cup. Luckily he isn’t that far from the ground, but it’s enough to knock the wind out of him for a few minutes. He tries to sit up, brushing bits of sticks and leaves off of his hair and face, and stands up, coughing. Where the light struck the earth is a smoking crater.

Dean watches it, holding his breath, until he sees movement in the center. Something much larger than a human being is stirring there. His heart sinks – Behemoth.

But three wings erupt from the earth, spraying him with loose soil and small stones, wings made of clasping golden hands with eyes in their palms, wings that are three stories tall. The rest of the thing rises from the earth like from water, another set of wings, shimmering in the light. Each wing is connected to a ring, and the rings form a chain around a face – three faces – a hundred faces – they shift, become one another, become lions and horses and eagles. Behemoth is just one creature. This is an angel; this is Castiel.

The thought moves his arms and legs until he’s sprinting to the crater, sliding down its sloping side, staring up at his friend in his true form. Cas doesn’t acknowledge him. He waves at some of the eyes, but they don’t look at him. Well, that’s not true. They’re looking at everything. The faces shift silently into each other.

“Hey, dumbass,” he shouts up at them.

The response is immediate and deafening. Castiel’s true voice sounds like bells ringing inside of bells, turning in on themselves. He shoves his fingers into his ears and grits his teeth until it’s over, then reaches up and touches one of the rings.

Castiel looks at him with Jimmy Novak’s face and falls into his arms. He’s home.

 

They make it back to the Impala without speaking a word to each other. On the drive back to Ashford, Castiel stares at the road ahead of them with a distant look on his face.

“You made it out all right,” Dean observes quietly.

Cas nods. “It’s all over now.”

He reaches over and claps him on the shoulder. “Well, you did good.”

Cas closes his eyes and nods again and doesn’t say anything else until they get back to the hotel.

It’s full-fledged night when he pulls into the inn parking lot and puts the Impala in park. Cas follows him to the room and sits on the couch while Dean heads into the shower and washes off the debris from the impact. When he’s done changing his clothes and drying his hair, he comes back out into the bedroom to see Cas flipping through channels on the tiny television set.

“Hey.”

After a moment, Cas looks up. “Hello,” he says. It sounds guarded. Dean frowns, and sits on the foot of the bed across from him.

“You doin’ all right?”

“No. We lost about a third of our forces in the battle. I’m still waiting for the complete roster to compile, but those are the statistics so far.”

Dean is silent.

“Rest assured that you wouldn’t have made that great an impact on the number of casualties after all,” Castiel continues. “Still. Fewer than if we had let it do what it wanted to.”

“Destroy the earth.”

“Yes.” He slumps back on the couch. Dean doesn’t think he’s ever seen Cas with anything less than perfect posture.

“Look,” Dean starts. “I...”

“Dean. I’m retiring.”

He blinks and bites off his reassurances. “Retiring? From what, being an angel?”

Cas huffs. “From being a soldier. From giving commands. A few trillion years is enough. This... is enough.”

“I ain’t gonna argue with that.”

Cas is in the body of a middle-aged man but he looks ancient, with the air of a veteran about him. The same kind of world-weary tiredness that his father’s Marine buddies had on them, but tenfold. His edges are worn and he is almost gone, but he remains somehow, and he remains here. With Dean Winchester in an old hotel room with false wood paneling and appliances from the seventies, as if there is not a year of emptiness and spite between them. He wonders what Sam would say. Something comforting. He’s never been very good at that, but he supposes that Cas is used to it by now.

He sleeps on the bed and Cas watches the television with the sound muted.

 

They head for California the next morning and drive down the coast, aimless, drifting, but content. The waves crash endlessly on the white shore. Gulls perch on the piers and rocks. Sandpipers dash in and out of the water. Castiel looks through the old cassette bin in the glove box meticulously, examining every tape until he finds one he likes. It’s one of Sam’s, of course – Cas hasn’t learned to appreciate the real classics yet, but he’ll come around. The tape opens with Dewey Bunnell crooning about alligator lizards and changing his name, and plays them down onto the Pacific Coast Highway.

From there, it’s diners and movie theaters and palm trees a mile high.

The gap between them closes, slowly, with glances and touches and shared meals. Dean’s never been good at apologizing; Castiel is good at being apologetic, but as always, he’s bad at phrasing things well. It doesn’t matter. They’re a good match that way; they don’t have to say it to know that they mean it. 

He feels old. Very old. He’s almost forty now and it seems like he’s at the end of his life. Everything feels like winter, which doesn’t match the sunny Californian weather. He looks at his face in the mirror when he shaves and finds new wrinkles. He buys a two-liter bottle of orange soda and drinks it with Cas on the end of a motel bed, watching Lifetime movies and making sarcastic comments. He teaches Cas to drive and soon he’s in the passenger seat almost constantly as they move from place to place, wasting time. He’s living much longer than he ever should have and it’s apparent in the way he forgets dates and places all the time, forgets faces. He’s been drained for a long time, now. Someday Death is going to knock at his door, sit down for some pizza, and take him away, but he doesn’t have an ounce of shit to give about that anymore. He’s just happy to be here.

Happiness used to be a full tank and an open road, but now it’s a tired and everpresent warmth, flickering at the edge of consciousness.

 

Sam’s grave is in Lawrence, next to Mom’s. Dad doesn’t have a gravestone.

The inscription is bland. Sam’s name in block letters, a dash between two dates, then “Son, brother, and friend.” It barely even covers what he was, but then again, he's never seen a gravestone that accurately represented anyone's life.

Dean stares at the words and notes all of the empty space. There’s not even a picture like Jessica’s stone had. Their lives are marked with long stretches of emptiness punctuated by death and struggle, like lone trees on a long, wide plain. He reaches down to touch it and lets his hand linger for a second. Sam’s not here. Sam’s happy somewhere up there, and if he has to haul himself up through Hell to see him again with no help this time, then he will. But that can wait. Someday he’ll go home, but maybe not today.

Cas bought flowers, because it’s appropriate or something. Just some carnations from the grocery store. Dean stares at the white blossoms and wonders if Sam is looking down on them and rolling his eyes.

“I never said goodbye,” Cas says.

“It’s not really goodbye. We’ll see him again sometime,” Dean points out.

“Yes. But it’s a courtesy, isn’t it?”

“I guess. But he’d never kick up a fuss about it, you know.”

“That’s true.”

“And he did like you.”

“Sometimes I wonder why,” he says wryly. “It seems to be a troublesome affair.”

Dean snorts. “Oh, it is.” Cas shoots him a withering look.

They stand in front of the grave for a while longer, and then Dean turns away from the headstone. Sam isn’t in the ground. Sam is somewhere else, just like everyone else in the family. And someday he’ll be there, too.

Cas turns to Dean, expression carefully blank. “So what do we do now?”

Dean shrugs. “I dunno. Vegas? Florida? _Canada?_ ”

“You’re suggesting things that elderly people do.”

“You’re retired, aren’t you? And I’m an elderly dude! I have a right to gamble all of my money away.”

“You have approximately sixty percent of your life ahead of you, Dean, so I wouldn’t advise that.” Castiel has that serious look on his face and Dean decides to humor him for now.

“I’ll do anything,” he says. “As long as it’s with you.”

He gets to see an angel crack a smile at that. “A similar thought had occurred to me.”

“Well. What are you thinking of? You’ve seen everything, right?”

“I haven’t shown you everything.”

This is enough. This is the apology, the admission, the oath of dedication. They both say goodbye to Sam’s headstone and travel over the dry yellow grass to the Impala parked at the curb. And with Dean riding shotgun and Cas at the wheel, the old things pass into the distance, and the sad scene of Lawrence rolls away.

Maybe Florida, maybe Vegas. Dean doesn’t know. He lets Cas do the deciding. And he waits for each new day like a new issue of Batman now. They move from motel to motel and glide across the indistinguishable highways, heading into the setting sun. Every important wound has been sealed with a promise. Every agony is lost in the wind.

 

Where are they going? Who knows? Who cares? They are side-by-side and on the move, and that’s all they really need.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter titles taken from "[Painless](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OiJhfc-5WI)" and "[Cover Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OscOLP8gkaY)" by Mae, respectively.


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